


Home is where you start from

by imsfire



Series: Fragments from the multiverse [3]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Closure, F/M, Gen, Home, reparations, searching records to see if your past is truly all lost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-02 02:36:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15787221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: The newly-established Office of Reparations on Coruscant is trying to reunite refugees, displaced persons, and Alliance serving personnal with their former property on Core Worlds, and possibly also with separated family members.Leia insists any of her staff entitled to use the service must do so...





	Home is where you start from

Jyn holds her hands out to the official.  Waits patiently and with a face of practiced unconcern while they scan her palms and the pads of her fingers. 

She has to discipline her expression slightly more when she’s offered a swab and a sealable tube.  There were too many years of hiding for it to be easy even now to surrender this data casually.  Even more than her hand-prints, her DNA could be used to identify her.  But the records-search can’t be completed without a clear and unequivocal ID.

Cassian, beside her, reaches out under the counter-top.  He squeezes her tense right hand briefly as she takes the swab in her left.  Jyn gives him a quick smile. 

They’re on Coruscant, not a favourite planet for either of them, but it’s where the newly-established Office of Reparations is based. 

The service is free of charge.  The Empire’s obsessive record-keeping is being put to some good use at last, to reunite families torn apart by the war, and restore stolen property and appropriated homes to their rightful owners.

“Too many refugees, too many people whose homes are lost to them.  Too many former child soldiers.” Leia had a face of thunder. “Too much harm that cannot be repaired.” Neither had questioned the orders, or her decision; they both knew only too well the shame and grief that lay behind it. “We need to set an example.  Everyone on my staff who’s entitled to is to make an appointment and use the service.  That’s an order.” And then, directly to Cassian, “Get some closure, for the love of light, Major.”

So; Coruscant.  For closure.

Closure was all that Cassian was going to get.  His records-search had been completed already, and it had borne exactly the results he’d expected.  He has no living relatives, no family connections, no unclaimed property. 

She’s pretty sure the same will be true for her.  But her family went into hiding so long ago she can barely remember their years here.  A few images remain, surfacing occasionally in dreams.  Many of them bring her face to face once again with the man in white, obscurely frightening even now he’s long dead.  But they don’t show anyone else, no other friends or family; just her parents, and sometimes the nanny droid she remembers calling Mac-Vee.  She has no idea if Galen and Lyra broke contact with anyone dear to them, when they ran for it in the middle of the night.  If they left parents or siblings behind, if there are, or once were, aunts and uncles, even grandparents, out there somewhere, who have never known what happened.  People who cared about her mama, her papa, and her, who wondered and cried at their disappearance, and waited for them to come home.

She swipes the little white swab on its plastene stick briskly round the inside of her cheek, clips it into the tube and hands it back.

Her picture, her personal details, now her palm-prints and DNA profile; all of it goes into the search system and the official nods to confirm the request has been sent.  “It can be anything from an hour to a couple of days to complete the full check,” they say calmly “but if you’d care to wait ten minutes we usually get an ETA for how long the results will take.”

“Okay.” Jyn takes Cassian’s hand again. “Yeah.  Ten minutes.  We can wait ten, can’t we?”

“Of course.”

She remembers how his hands shook, the day they came to pick up his results.  Fest is far off on the Outer Rim, and the colony’s records were scanty and fragmented.  It hadn’t been a quick search.  In the last couple of hours before he finally knew, he’d admitted to her that part of him still hoped there might be someone out there for him, some relative, however distant.  Someone with Andor blood in their veins, and eyes he would recognise. 

When the news came, he’d swallowed and gone still, and finally just nodded slowly. 

“At least now I know,” he said to her later.  That as he’d always suspected, he was alone.

Alone but for the people he has now.  Alone but for her, and the friends, the family, he found in their team and has kept now the war is over.

Now it’s her turn, to find out if the same is true for her.  If she is alone but for him and Bodhi, and K-2, and the Guardians.

They sit shoulder to shoulder, hands linked and tensed, without speaking.

Ten minutes pass weirdly quickly, when she would have expected to them to drag.  Already the officer is approaching them. “Ms Erso?  We have a preliminary result for you.  Initial indications are that there are several records to be obtained here on Coruscant.  It would appear that your parents both made wills, the year after you were born.” 

When they were living here, as guests of the Empire, while her father worked and her mother doubted, and the man in white smiled at them all like pets.  

“We can arrange to have verified copies of those by tomorrow morning.  And there are two records from the land registry.  Those tend to take a few days to clear, but I can tell you that the documents pertain to two property purchases, one here on Coruscant and the other a significant holding of farmland on Lah’mu.”

“On? – Stars, it must be the farm.  I didn’t know it was bought and registered formally.” And the first property – could it be the apartment?  She can just about remember the view from the picture windows, and her bedroom with the red covers on the cot. “But surely they must both have been sold-on long ago.”

“There’s no indication of that.  It’s possible, but both sets of documentation are listed as current.” The official nods their head in professional friendliness.  “Obviously we can’t say for certain until the verified copies arrive.  But assuming the wills name you as beneficiary of your parents’ estate, it’s likely you are now the owner of both properties.”

She doesn’t want to own anything on Coruscant.  The place is nightmarish.  Even a business visit of a few days is depressing.  But – though she doesn’t want to be a land-owner, Force alive no – still there is a surge of memories like the sea-tide rising; and with a strange sense of surprise Jyn says “The farm was home…” 

It’s a curious thought, to maybe see those hills again, the rocks and islands and the black sand beach where her mother taught her to swim.  “Have you ever been there, to Lah’mu?” she asks Cassian. He shakes his head.  Doesn’t press her to say more, just holds her gaze and smiles.

The patience he learned in years of spying makes him gentle and patient with her who is neither of those things with anyone, least of all herself.  All his own emotions set aside; she hates that he’s so skilled in doing that, hates the thought of how he was shaped to be that way, what he had to live through.  But Cassian lets her be where she is and who she is, lets her be in her feelings and moods, lets her feel her way through and find the words she needs.  So very few people have done that in Jyn’s life.

“If this is really –“ she says - “if I really still own that land, I – I’d like to go back.  See if there’s anything left.  Saw told me it was all burned by the Imps but maybe there’s something to rebuild.  I’d like to see it, anyway.”

Cassian nods his head slowly.

She’d wanted so much for him to find someone; had chiefly agreed to the trip in the hope of seeing him reunited with cousins somewhere.  Yet for him who deserved so much, there’s nothing; and for her, it seems, an inheritance. 

She can share it with him.  It was home, once.  Perhaps it could be a home again one day.  “Would you come?  I’d like to show you.”

“Of course.  If you’re sure.”

It isn’t fair.  Everything seems to conspire to push him back and lift her up.  She’d never have recovered her own hope of finding anything more in life than bare survival, without Cassian.  He deserves a home as much as her, maybe more, because he gave her his.

“I’m sure.  Please.  Please come home with me.”


End file.
